King Arthur never actually lived, but stories about him were extremely popular in Medieval Europe. One of the most well known today is _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_. The poem survives in only one manuscript that dates to the late 14th century. The language is Middle English, but belongs to a conservative rural dialect […]
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This first photo shows two of the roughly 1,300 specimens of minerals and gems on display in the Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. I had a chance to see the exhibit yesterday. It was wild to see jewels created out of the ash from Mount
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This painted screen by American artist Thomas Wilmer Dewing is representative of the Aesthetic movent in art that emerged out of the mid-19th century. Posing itself in opposition to repressive and overbearing strains of the Victorian culture of the age, Aesthetics valued sensuous and beautiful artwork. Conservative Victorians turned their noses up at Aestheticism, but
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Camp followers have been part of military history since soldiers have been deployed, but the French kept up a regulated system of prostitutes to serve their armies well into the 20th century. These were the “BMCs” or “Bordelles Militaires de Champagne,” aka Military Field Bordellos.In fact, they really only got going during the colonial wars
Behold the Wonderwerk cave in South Africa, yet another place on my travel bucket list and also an archaeological site giving evidence for one of the most important inventions humans ever came up with: cooking.Ashes and bone fragments from Wonderwerk have been found from a million years ago, suggesting that our distant relatives, Homo Erectus,
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This sweet painting by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller from 1854 is called _Grandmother with Three Grandchildren_. In it , three cheery young girls surround a seated older woman, eyes gazing on some scrap of paper she is holding. All four females are comfortable with each other, and wear relaxed and happy expressions. The image of
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One of the best things about studying history is that it has the potential to make one’s day just a little bit better because The Past had so many shitty components. For instance, there’s a fairly good chance that if you are reading this, you are not dealing with head lice.Lice are just enough of
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66 million years ago, there was a Very Bad Day for nearly everyone on the planet. That’s when the asteroid responsible for ending the age of the dinosaurs crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula and destroyed about 78% of all species.This picture from Trinidad Lake State Park in Colorado shows one of the places where the
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Spooky season is almost upon us, and thus it feels appropriate to share this rural legend and roadside attraction near the border of Carbon and Luzerne Counties in the forested mountains of Pennsylvania’s mining communities. I am writing, of course, about the Cursed Stone Couch of Weatherly, PA. Folktales — especially frightening ones — often
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Today Shippensburg University’s history department sponsored a trip to the Eckley Miner’s Village — a restored community built after 1854 when a mining firm called Sharpe, Leisenring and Company began construction on a small community (between 1,000-1,500 people) specifically to house the coal miners who worked for them. The region had hundreds of similar establishments,
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This is the title page for one of the most fascinating and popular books of the Italian Renaissance – _De rerum natura_, or, _On the Nature of Things_, by the Ancient Roman Lucretius. The expense of the artwork and skill of the miniaturist – the copier was an Augustinian friar for Pope Sixtus IV dating
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This is Ilya Ivanov, sometime known as the “Red Frankenstein” because of his experiments with inter-species breeding.In the early days of communist Russia, Ivanov earned a reputation for developing artificial insemination techniques that allowed him to develop hybrids of closely-related species: “zeedonks” (zebra with donkey), “zubrons” (European bison with cows) and sundry blends of rabbits,
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Epidemiological studies is a fascinating blend of science and history. There’s a lot of ways we can benefit now from the study of past disease. The pock-marked friars shown here might well have been suffering from an illness that most folks today are blessedly free from: measles.Measles is a human virus (MeV), but, like SARS-COV2,
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This political cartoon of Serge Voronoff (1866-1951) shows him as a circus performer, reaching into the gut of an exotically dressed assistant while masses of people line up to watch the operation. Voronoff detested this sort of depiction, because he took his work extremely seriously. After all, he was considered a leader in organ transplant
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War is a complex phenomenon riddled with tragic deaths and players with a kaleidescope of myopic perspectives. The Spanish Civil War exemplifies this, as does one of its central figures – the left-wing feminist, supporter of the poor, and propagandist Dolores Ibárruri (1895-1989).Ibárruri, known as “La Pasionaria”, had a mindset shaped by her impoverished background
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Here you see a picture of Achilles making sacrifices to Zeus. It is a unique image, coming from a 5th-century CE manuscript thought to be the only one from Antiquity illustrating Homer’s epic poem _The Illiad_. The scarcity of such depictions belies the importance of Homer on Ancient Roman culture, because all educated people would
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Today’s post is about paint colors — with the growth of modern chemistry (particularly Germany in the 1800s and beyond), making artificial pigments of various hues has been relatively easy. But it was not always so. Purple of course was the most famously sought-after hue, but I am featuring two others here: ultramarine (as used
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In the late 1800s, Victorian values had made many folks worried — VERY WORRIED — about girls and women partaking in a new trend. Medical doctors and many Victorian-influenced bourgeoisie thought this new pastime would make them unhealthy, lusty (a bad thing, in their minds), or even UGLY. The name of the new trend? Bicycle
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On August 19, 2021, American artist Chuck Close passed away from cardiopulmonary failure. His works appear in museums around the world and are easily recognizable as oversized portraits that take up entire walls. Early in his career he focused on super-realistic faces that cannot be distinguished from photographs even from close up, like the first
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The most notorious surgery of the 20th century is the lobotomy, and the most infamous practicioner of this operation was the neurologist Walter Freeman (d. 1972). For a couple of decades in the mid-20th century, Freeman performed about 3,500 lobotomies on mentally ill patients, developing a technique of entering the brain through the eye socket
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